Whether interconnecting facilities in support of high-frequency trading, high-performance computing, business continuity, disaster recovery, migration of virtual machines among physical servers or some other demanding application, there are certain networking requirements that tend to be shared among enterprise data-center managers. Optical networking is not a commodity technology space, and data-center managers must investigate at least seven primary areas of technological differentiation in doing their due diligence to deploy the right solution for their given organization’s specific interconnection requirements: